Two, in case I missed the first, emails courtesy of Michael Healy from BrightTALK.

Yet another “great deal” from Groupabulous, Grouptastic, Grouptacular, or some other incarnation of Groupon.

Upon receipt of the unsolicited BrightTALK emails, I scrolled to the bottom to click the “unsubscribe” link, BUT THERE WASN’T ONE. Are you kidding me? Is that even legal anymore? Breathless, I went to their website and searched for the “Get Revenge” link. Useless. Now I was on a mission. I searched LinkedIn and found their Chief Marketing Officer. Perhaps she could find and severely punish Michael Healy. After not finding an email, I did a little more internet sleuthing and found her Twitter handle. Then I sent her a message.

A few hours later, she tweeted back asking me to forward the email to someone in tech support. A day or two later they replied with an apology and a promise to, “look into providing an opt-out for these emails in the near future.”

Wow. “In the near future?” I though “opt-out” was a pretty standard practice of email marketing these days… We put an “opt-out” on all marketing emails and even on our customer satisfaction surveys, but very few of our customers ever opt-out. It must be the great content…

As for Groupalicious, I have no one to blame but my girlfriend. Yeah, a while back she forwarded me this “great new thing” (the woman loves a bargain) and wrote, “…blah, blah, blah you have to join for all the great deals.” OK, so I opted in. Finally, after months of “great deals,” multiple sub-brand emails per day and that stupid cat, I’d had it. I clicked “unsubscribe” with authority. After figuring out what my password was, I was able to log-in and opt-out of about 15 categories of sp…, uh, email. Then it brought me to this hilarious page. It’s pure brilliance and allowed me to “punish” Derrick, the guy who thought it was a good idea to send me the emails…